Profile

As managing director of Red & Yellow, Diane Charton steers the strategic direction of the business. She strives to empower and educate the SA marketing communications industry through a myriad of traditional and digital educational platforms. With a unique combination of marketing, leadership and engineering experience, Charton brings a multifaceted approach to using marketing trends and insights to innovate and empower the industry as a whole. Follow @DiCharton on Twitter.

As managing director of Red & Yellow, Diane Charton steers the strategic direction of the business. She strives to empower and educate the SA marketing communications industry through a myriad of traditional and digital educational platforms. With a unique combination of marketing, leadership and engineering experience, Charton brings a multifaceted approach to using marketing trends and insights to innovate and empower the industry as a whole.

Charton is frequently quoted in South African media and invited to speak at conferences because of her ability to bring insight and illumination to the latest trends and technologies in the world of traditional and digital marketing communication.

The brands that will stand out in 2015 will be those that leave the 'herd' behind. This is the view of Di Charton, managing director of the Red & Yellow School, who adds that the shape of advertising will continue to change...

As South African newspapers and magazines come under increasing pressure from digital competition, so must they look to digital innovations such as augmented reality to rejuvenate their business models.

Brands around the world face a significant challenge in understanding new consumer behaviours and patterns of thinking, which are rendering many of the techniques marketers and advertisers relied on in the past obsolete.

Video, once an expensive and cumbersome format for Web users in South Africa, is quickly moving into the mainstream. Marketers that don't buy into its potential are at risk of falling behind the needs of their audience.

Many companies run Twitter, Facebook or YouTube accounts to supplement their other offline and online marketing activities, yet few have understood that social media is quickly becoming as important a customer service channel, as it is a marketing opportunity.

Online reputation management (ORM) is the discipline of monitoring and analysing the reputation of a person, organisation or industry. Far from only using it as a crisis management tool, it can also deliver benefits to businesses that use it in a more proactive manner by analysing content across all types of online media.

2011 looks set to be an exciting year for the digital marketing world, with a great deal of action likely to take place in the mobile and social media spaces. Here are a few of the trends I expect to see shaping the year ahead.

As we move into 2010, we can look forward to robust growth for the online advertising industry as bandwidth prices keep falling, more consumers join the broadband world, and more companies embrace the benefits of digital.